Paul J. Lucas

Paul started programming Commodore PETs in high school. The first computer he owned was an Apple ][plus that he programmed in BASIC, Pascal, and 6502 Assembly. While an undergraduate, he taught himself C and has been programming in C since. He’s also programmed in Bash, Go, Java, Perl, and Python, but C and C++ are still his favorites.

He started his career at AT&T Bell Labs in telephony, log file visualization, testing cfront (the first C++ compiler), and wrote the “The C++ Programmer’s Handbook.” He’s also worked at NASA Ames Research Center, various start-ups, and lastly at Splunk. He has patents on data visualization, log file analysis, programming language type systems, skewing of scheduled queries, and cache-aware searching. Recently, he wrote “Why Learn C.”

He developed open-source projects including CHSM, a finite state automata system, used by telecommunications companies and CERN for managing reactive systems; and maintains cdecl, the C- and C++-to-English translator.